Today I want to continue where I left off yesterday — think of this as part two.
Find out the precise beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires of your audience. Understand what they carry with them throughout the day.
We all have assumptions about how the world works, but many of us don’t realise we carry them. People refer to a collection of beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires as a worldview.
A worldview is the strongest force in marketing. Stronger than any headline you write, any offer you create, or any discount you imagine.
Let me give you an analogy.
Imagine one person. Inside their head, they carry a story: distrust of Big Pharma.
That attitude is a drop of water.
Now picture that same person. They have a mixed bag of beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires.
Think Big Pharma cares more about profit than people. They want to grow their own food, make their own herbal remedies, and avoid corporate products.
These aren’t random. They fit together like puzzle pieces to form one complete picture.
That collection of a person’s beliefs, attitudes, values, and desires is a stream.
Now imagine a hundred people, all sharing roughly the same internal story.
When that happens, you get a river. It’s a large group of people moving together.
The river is a shared worldview.
In the last post, I mentioned that when I built Eatweeds, I didn’t seek out people interested in foraging. I looked for people who believed the land could provide. I also looked for people who felt our culture had become too disconnected from food.
I didn’t need to convince anyone because they were already carrying that worldview – like a coat they had worn for years.
My job was to speak to it, honour it, and build a world they’d want to stay in. That’s how I explained foraging to new people: not as a new idea, but as something that belonged to the river they were already part of.
As marketing thought leader Seth Godin puts it: ‘people like us do things like this’.
You’re not out to change anyone’s mind at this stage. You’re finding the people whose minds already work like yours, then serving them so well that they never want to leave.
Here’s today’s question: What beliefs does your audience have? What attitudes, values, and desires do they hold?